It’s always good when a credentialed media source catches up with The First Street Journal, but one thing is certain: it only happens reluctantly.

If progressives don’t start taking rising crime seriously, they risk getting mugged by reality

Opinion by Helaine Olen Roshkow | Washington Post Columnist | July 10, 2021 | 8:00 AM EDT

Democrats, Republicans and independents all say there is a “major crisis” in violent crime, according to a poll released this week. This a serious matter. Crime is up throughout the United States. The murder rate surged nearly 20 percent in 2020, compared with 2019. Road-rage shootings have doubled nationally, claiming victims such as 6-year-old Aiden Leos in California in May.

But many among the progressive community don’t want to admit this. They seem to believe that acknowledging a covid-era crime wave will jeopardize hard-won gains fighting for bail and sentencing reform, attempts to reform the nation’s police forces, and the fight to address racial injustice. MSNBC host Joy Reid, for example, recently accused the media of riling people up over the issue, tweeting: “I’ve seen more TV stories about crime than the actual anecdotes from friends in [New York City] or other big cities bear out.” Others point out the levels are rising from numbers significantly lower than during the height of the crack epidemic in the 1980s, so why worry?

It was 1999, and I was on the ‘management team’ with the company for which I then worked. A friend of mine named Ken, also on the management team, was responsible for our safety numbers, among other things. We were all under instructions from the corporate Vice President to have numerical goals for different things, and Ken was supposed to have a numerical goal for lost time accidents. He quipped, “So, if we’re below our target, does that mean we have to go out and deliberately hurt someone?”

Obviously, the goal for lost time accidents should be zero, but if it’s always zero, you’ll always fail. Mrs Roshkow at least seems to recognize this: going higher on a negative is always a failure, and no one is going to be satisfied with an “it’s not as bad as the 90s” answer.

Trouble is, she doesn’t recognize what happened in the 1990s, when Mayor Rudy Giuliani cleaned up the horror story that was then New York City by being a Republican who was tough on crime.

The denial needs to stop. The failure to engage and take on the issue of growing violence and lawbreaking now — no matter how unpleasant, distasteful or uncomfortable — will only harm the progressive agenda and potentially cause swing voters to pull the lever for Republican candidates.

You mean Republicans who will actually get things done in reducing crime?

Traditionally, voters view Democrats and progressives as softer on crime than “law and order” Republicans. That’s why even right-leaning Democrats are sometimes vulnerable to getting pinned as supporters of the far-left slogan “defund the police.” Rising crime rates provide an opening to grandstanding Republicans, who claim it is the result of Democrats not adequately supporting cops. As House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said this week: “Crime is soaring in cities managed by Democrats.”

Ridiculous. But the politics of backlash is a real thing. As we’ve seen in both the distant and near past, fear can lead otherwise left-leaning people to vote in a more right-wing direction. The violent crime wave of the 1990s ultimately gave us the now-reviled federal anti-crime bill in 1994 and California’s “three strikes” law, which sent shoplifters to prison for decades. More recently, the “defund the police” slogan is widely suspected of costing Democrats votes in tight 2020 congressional elections while in June’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York City, Eric Adams, running on a “law and order” platform, decisively defeated more progressive challengers, such as Maya Wiley.

Mrs Roshkow said that Mr McCarthy’s claim was “Ridiculous,” but it’s the stone-cold truth. I’ve harped on foul, fetid, fuming, foggy, filthy Philadelphia on this site, but the numbers don’t lie: the Philadelphia Police Department’s Current Crime Statistics page showed that, as of 11:59 PM EDT on Thursday, 291 people had spilled their life’s blood out on the city’s mean streets. 291 ÷ 189 days so far in the year, = 1.5397 homicides per day, for a projected 562 for the year. Philly’s record is an even 500, set in the crack cocaine wars of 1990, while 2020 came in second with 499. If the rate continues as is, the City of Brotherly Love will not just break the unfortunate record, but leave it far behind in the rear view mirror. The current pace is so bad that, if maintained, the city will tie the 1990 record on the Sunday before Thanksgiving, with six weeks left in the year.

Naturally, instead of supporting the get tough on criminals policies which worked in the 1990s, she blames not actual criminals, but those inanimate guns that seem to levitate and shoot people all by themselves!

Progressives, instead of denying rising crime, should stick the blame right where it belongs — on Republicans. Gun sales increased significantly last year. The one thing that links almost all gun violence? Easy access to firearms. But Republicans refuse to back even minor restrictions on guns ownership. Another thing that stops crime? Summer jobs programs for teens living in poverty. Fund more of them — and remind people which party often opposes doing that.

Thing is, it might not be those evil reich-wing Republicans buying all of those guns. Also from The Washington Post, on the same day:

‘Fear on top of fear’: Why anti-gun Americans joined the wave of new gun owners

Pandemic, police violence, calls to ‘defund the police’ fuel surge of first-time buyers

By Marc Fisher, Miranda Green, Kelly Glass and Andrea Eger | July 10, 2021

All his life, Jabril Battle was anti-gun. Then came the pandemic, the lockdown, the shortages and a feeling that at any moment, things could blow. Battle bought a Beretta.

Drawn to last summer’s protests against police violence, Savannah Grace found herself face-to-face with a camo-clad officer’s long gun. She’d always hated guns, but went out and got a Glock 45.

In blue cities and red suburbs alike, firearms purchases soared last year — to the highest level in half a century, based on federal background checks. A striking portion of those sales went to first-time gun buyers — 40 percent, according to the firearms industry’s trade association. Other studies show first-timers accounting for more like a fifth of sales in 2020, but that’s still unusually high, retailers said.

Overall gun ownership nationwide jumped from 32 percent of Americans to 39 percent last year, according to University of Chicago survey data — well under the 50 percent level of half a century ago, but the biggest jump in recent decades.

From the downtown streets left empty by the pandemic’s shutdowns to the sharp spike in homicides and the nationwide conflict over the role and behavior of police officers, a disorienting and often frightening year drove many decisions to buy guns, according to dealers and buyers alike.

That doesn’t sound like the bad guys buying guns — not that most of them buy them legally anyway — but by ordinary people afraid of the bad guys, and of policies by the left that would reduce police protection.

Sales to women and people of color rose in 2020. Firearms industry data shows sales jumping 50 percent among Black customers, 47 percent among Hispanics and 43 percent among Asian Americans, though gun ownership remains proportionately lower among those groups compared with Whites.

Actually, the linked data show that “The highest overall firearm sales increase comes from Black men and women who show a 58.2 percent increase in purchases during the first six months of 2020 versus the same period last year.” Maybe this from The Philadelphia Inquirer is why:

Nearly 94% of the 10,000 people shot (in Philadelphia) since 2015 were Black or brown, according to the city’s data. Three-quarters of the victims were Black males.

There’s something wryly amusing that the Inquirer follows the Associated Press stylebook change, in which the AP noted that they would capitalize “black” in reference to race, but not “white,” and in this case, the writers capitalized “black” but not “brown”. As per our stylebook, we do not capitalize ‘colors’ when referring to race.

This is the real reason “anti-gun Americans joined the wave of new gun owners”: because the incredible surge in homicides has occurred in their neighborhoods! The very people they politically support are the ones among whom the surge in violence has occurred.

A lot of the city statistics released do not include the race of victims and known killers, but St Louis, our highest homicide rate city, does. According to the report dated July 11^th, out of 99 homicide victims thus far, 92 (74 males and 18 females) were black. In a city that is not quite half black, 46.41% black to be more precise, 92.9% of the homicide victims are black. More, of the 42 identified suspects of those 92 murders, 41 are black, and the other is listed as ‘unknown.’

So, how dangerous is it to live in St Louis? Using the figures from the St Louis Police Department, I created the chart above. Taking the population of St Louis, 294,890, adjusting it for race and sex by percentages of the population, dividing the number of homicides by 191, for the number of days so far in the year (up to July 10^th), then multiplying that number by 365, I arrived at projected homicides for 2021. Taking those numbers, dividing by population, and then by 100,000, I got the anticipated homicide rate per 100,000 population, the way figures are normally reported. If you are a white male, you are facing a homicide rate of 8.26 per 100,000 population; white women are looking at a homicide rate of 5.73.

But if you are black? Black women are facing a homicide rate of 46.62 per 100,000, while black males have the number 204.25 per 100,000 population staring them dead in the eye!

If the problem were just that there are too many guns, why is there such a discrepancy between the murder rates between whites and blacks, in the same city? That’s the question which nobody will ask, because nobody is willing to look at the answer.

Yes, I know: some people say that math is racist, but math just is. And if you are unwilling to look at the facts, without excluding things because you don’t look at where certain evidence might lead, you will never get the right answers.

The answer is simple: there is something in the urban black culture which teaches too many of its children that it’s perfectly acceptable to go out and shoot other people. Maybe why that is ought to be the question people should ask.